Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

ONE WITH THE TIGER

Steven Church

Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Man and Animal

An imaginative exploration of the thin membrane between animal and human and the cultural influences that define it.

Using the story of David Villalobos, who jumped into a tiger habitat at the Bronx Zoo, and other moments of violent encounters between humans and predators, Steven Church focuses the line between man and animal, and explores what he defines as the “shared liminal space between peace and violence.” Church posits that the animal is always encroaching on the civilization, and those seeking its wildness are in fact searching for an ecstatic moment that can define what it means to be human.
Using examples from Timothy Treadwell to Mike Tyson, or such television icons as Grizzly Adams and The Incredible Hulk, Church shows how this ecstasy can seep its way into the less natural world of popular culture, proving time and again that each of us can be our own worst predator.

Steven Church is the author of The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record (Simon & Schuster 2006), winner of the Colorado Book Award; Theoretical Killings: Essays and Accidents (UNO Press, 2009); The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst (Soft Skull, 2010) Ultrasonic (Lavender Ink, 2014), a collection of essays featured in the LA Times, The Paris Review Tin House, among others.

Available products
Book Published 2016-11-01 by Soft Skull
Book Published 2016-11-01 by Soft Skull

Comments

In One with the Tiger, Steven Church stalks the entire genre of nature writing, rips it down to the raw bone, then reassembles the parts into something totally new and utterly compelling. Like the best of John Krakauer or Rebecca Solnit, the narrative pulls you in and absolutely refuses to let you go—or forget. Church is writing at the very apex of his game, and One with the Tiger is likely the most innovative, disturbing, and brilliant book you›ll read all year.

Muscular, vulnerable, twitchy, and relentlessly curious, Steven Church’s awesome One with the Tiger stalks some of our most absurd, sometimes-violent, and uncontainable compulsions for communion and self-destruction, and finds, lurking within them, a fragile, funny, and heartbreaking humanity. Church’s interrogation of our cockeyed innateness braids evisceration with assurance, bite with whisper. I never wanted Church’s wild and bemused treatises on absorption, collision, truth, family, ecstasy, strange spiritual yearning, and— ultimately— even stranger empathy to ever stop.

One With the Tiger explores the deep human need to participate in an atavistic ecstasy; to be, as Church puts it “absorbed but not destroyed.” Church’s approach is not clinical, moralizing, or gee-whiz superficial; it is, to our benefit, essayistic. By circling rather than simplifying, he illuminates the taboo, ever-shifting boundaries between man and animal. Church is the rare author who knows what’s interesting— which is to say, uncomfortable—about his chosen subject.

One with the Tiger is a meditation on animality and the space between suburbs and savanna, citizenship and savagery. Church is as close to the teeth of the beast as he is to escape. This is his love letter to animal magnetism, primal fear, and the wilderness of human imagination. The genius of this book is how it questions who is in captivity: the tiger in its cage or you.

Some of us are born with a lust for the ledges, for any chance to make the leap. In this mesmerizing collection, Steven Church proves, once again, that he is a master of evaporating lines between fact and fiction, imagination and memory. This book overtook me.

Savage and Unruly Minds Read more...

An exploration of the fascination with the "savage and the wild inside" us, which fuels the human desire to ‘get intimately close to apex predators’ … A powerfully written attention-grabber.

Seven Questions With Steven Church Read more...

[One With The Tiger] is exactly what literary nonfiction should be: imaginative, formally elastic, emotionally engrossing, and deeply intelligent.